Case Study 02 — Amara: Emotions She Has for Other People

Chapter 6 Application: Emotion

The Scene

Amara was having a hard week. Her mother had called three times — increasingly distressed messages about a financial problem Amara did not fully understand, which was typical — and Amara had called back twice and left a message once and was aware that a fourth call was probably coming.

She talked about it with Kemi, who asked: "How do you feel about the situation?"

Amara considered this. "I feel like I need to help her figure it out," she said.

Kemi, who had known Amara for four years and knew when she was answering a different question: "That's what you think you should do. I asked how you feel."

Another pause. "Worried," Amara said. "About her."

"Okay. What else?"

A longer pause. "Tired," she finally said. And then, after a moment: "And something I don't really have a word for. Like... resentful? But that feels wrong to say about my mother."

"Why does it feel wrong?"

"Because she needs help. You don't resent someone for needing help."

The Psychology

The Blocked Emotion

Amara's difficulty naming what she feels about her mother's situation is not accidental. It reflects a specific and patterned emotional dynamic: she has learned, over many years, that certain emotions in the context of her mother are inadmissible.

Resentment — the emotion that says: I have given more than I can sustainably give; this dynamic is unfair; something is being taken from me — is an emotion with a clear appraisal core. It arises when someone perceives a chronic imbalance in giving and receiving, combined with insufficient acknowledgment.

For Amara, these conditions have been present since childhood. She has given substantially and continuously — stability, management, care — to a parent who has not been reliably able to reciprocate. The conditions for resentment have been objectively present for a long time.

But Amara has learned not to feel it. Or more precisely: she has learned to process the conditions that would produce resentment in a way that routes the emotional energy elsewhere — into worry, into action, into doing what needs to be done.

This is not simple suppression. It is closer to what psychologists call emotional reorganization: the appraisal that would produce resentment ("this is unfair; I am being depleted") is replaced, very quickly and largely automatically, with an alternative appraisal that feels more morally acceptable ("she needs help; I can provide it; this is what love requires").

The Moral Dimension

What makes Amara's situation particularly instructive is the moral content of her blocked emotion. Resentment toward a parent with an addiction — especially a parent who is struggling — violates powerful implicit norms about what good children feel. Loyalty, compassion, worry, love: these are appropriate. Resentment, exhaustion, or anger: these carry guilt and shame.

This moral structure shapes emotional experience, not just expression. Amara does not just suppress her resentment; she appraises the situation in ways that minimize the likelihood of the emotion arising in the first place.

The cost of this reorganization is that she cannot accurately assess her own experience of the relationship. She knows she is "tired" — that is physical enough to be undeniable. She does not know she is resentful — that would require acknowledging that the relationship is unjust, which would require a confrontation with a reality she has organized her life around not seeing.

Emotions "For" Rather Than "About"

Kemi's question reveals another important feature of Amara's emotional style. Her initial answer — "I feel like I need to help her" — is not an emotion at all. It is a behavioral orientation. She translated "how do you feel" into "what do you think you should do" so rapidly and automatically that she did not notice the substitution.

This substitution is a learned pattern. Amara grew up in a household where the appropriate response to emotional distress — her own or others' — was action. Feeling your own sadness or resentment did not help. Figuring out what to do did. Emotion became instrumentalized: it was processed insofar as it produced a behavioral direction.

The psychological cost is that Amara's emotional experience tends to be organized "for" other people rather than "about" her own experience. She has emotions about her mother's wellbeing; she has less access to emotions about her own experience of having a mother with an addiction.

The Work Available

Kemi's question — "what else?" — is a simple but important clinical move. Accepting the first answer and stopping there would have left them in the territory of worry and action. The "what else?" created space for the more threatening emotion to emerge.

For Amara, the work of this chapter's concepts involves:

Expanding emotional vocabulary — developing precise language for the emotions she has been reorganizing out of existence (resentment, depletion, grief, anger)
De-moralizing the emotions — recognizing that resentment about an unjust dynamic does not mean she does not love her mother; that anger about a difficult situation does not mean she is a bad daughter
Learning to attend to her own experience — rather than immediately converting emotional experience into behavioral direction

This is slower and harder than the pattern she has, because the pattern has been serving her: it allows her to keep functioning in a relationship that has always asked a great deal of her. Feeling the resentment means feeling the cost. And feeling the cost means something changes — either in the relationship, or in Amara's willingness to absorb it.

That is the confrontation she is not yet ready for, but is beginning to approach.

Discussion Questions

Amara has learned to moralize her emotional life — to exclude certain emotions (resentment, anger toward her mother) as inadmissible. How does moral framing shape what emotions people allow themselves to feel? Is this always distorting, or are there cases where moral constraints on emotional experience are appropriate?
The case describes Amara converting emotional questions into behavioral direction — "I feel like I need to help" rather than a feeling. What does this suggest about the relationship between emotion and action orientation? Is the conversion always adaptive or always problematic?
The chapter distinguishes guilt ("I did something bad") from shame ("I am bad"). Where does Amara's suppressed resentment fit in this framework? Is she experiencing guilt about feeling resentful, shame about being the kind of person who would feel that way, or something else?
Kemi's intervention — simply asking "what else?" — created space for a more authentic response. What made this simple question effective? What relational conditions must exist for this kind of inquiry to be received rather than deflected?